Links - 4th February 2020 (1)

I,Hypocrite - Posts - *Hot guy in bed with 3 hot women*
*4 unimpressive men with 1 unimpressive woman (from story: "Polyamorous woman, 20, reveals she fell pregnant by one of her FOUR partners after they all went on vacation together - but she says they will ALL raise the baby as a 'family'")*
"Expectation vs Reality"

Many women use dating apps to confirm their attractiveness - "Men were significantly more likely than women to meet up with persons contacted through dating apps, more likely to 'swipe right' and far more likely to meet women in private settings, and far more likely to make contact with matches.They were also more likely to respond to conversations.The researchers said in sum men seem to be engaged more in 'hooking up activities'.Women, by contrast said their main motivation in going online was self-affirmation, in other words to feel good, rather than seeking a committed relationship or sex"

Fake international students commit fraud to work illegally in Canada: Immigration experts - "Nearly one-third of international students were believed to not be enrolled in a Canadian school in 2015, according to a recent report from Statistics Canada... the number of temporary residents with a post-secondary study permit increased by 46.1 percent in recent years. The number went from 201,186 students in 2009 to 294,020 in 2015.The report said that this is an improvement from 2009. In 2009, about half of all international students were believed to be enrolled in a post-secondary school despite being in Canada on a study permit. Harpreet Kochhar, assistant deputy minister of immigration, told a conference of immigration consultants that about 10 percent of student visa applications are fraudulent. The student visa rejection rate has increased from 24 percent in 2014 to a high of 39 percent this year.Project Atlas reported that Canada was ranked fifth in the number of international students admitted in 2018. Canada issued 370,710 student visas. Boraks said that illegal workers posing as international students often go into jobs in the transportation industry. He said that these illegal workers have suppressed wages, taken jobs away from Canadians, and caused vehicle accidents."

Is This Cellphone Prediction from 1953 Real? - "Modern phones are certainly “carried about by the individual.” Phones can also be integrated with smartwatches, perform video calls, and provide near-instantaneous translations.While this is a genuine newspaper clipping from 1953 containing a largely accurate prediction about modern phones, we’d like to provide a little additional context to this rumor. For starters, the person making these claims was the president of a phone company and was likely privy to latest developments in the field. For instance, while it wouldn’t be until the 1960s for the first cordless phone to be invented, and the 1980s for true mobile phones to hit the market, the foundations for these products were being laid prior to 1953."

The Invention of the Video Phone - " In 1936, Dr. Georg Schubert, an engineer working for the German post office, developed the world’s first public video telephone service and called it the Gegensehn-Fernsprechanlage (visual telephone system). The system connected the two cities Berlin und Leipzig and covered a distance of approximately 100 miles"

#NotAllMrMen: Mr Clever is a smug, sexist mansplainer. Should he be cancelled? - "No, really. Go and read the original Mr Clever book. It’s a study in hubris. Mr Clever’s intelligence has made him smug and hard to love, and we watch as he gradually alienates himself from the world with his sense of superiority.
Right! So you’re saying that the character was always intended as a means to demonstrate the importance of empathy over intelligence?
Yes!
And you’re implying that, by making the same assumptions without having the necessary understanding of context, those now calling out Mr Clever have effectively committed the same act of hubris that scuppered their archenemy Mr Clever?...
I tell you who is a mansplainer, though.
Don’t.
Little Miss Brainy. She mansplains all the time. I mean it.
Don’t.
Why not?
Well, how does that book end?
Her intelligence sends her to Africa where she is eaten by a lion.
So now you’re saying that intelligent women deserve to be eaten by lions. You’ve just made everything worse."
I'm not sure how satirical this is supposed to be

‘Girls Need Female Role Models’ and Other Bromides - "“We need a female perspective.” Editors use this to justify the publication of dull women writers. But there is no such thing as a female perspective. Or a male perspective, for that matter. Our perspective is based on our individual experience and is therefore fundamentally subjective. Two years ago, a Sunday paper asked me to write an article about being a woman in the City. Tell us how you were harassed and discriminated, the editor instructed, and how hard it was to work among men. The truth is, I was never harassed, discriminated, or mistreated in any way. In fact, I had a fabulous time. Looking back at my career, I realise that I enjoyed greater success than my modest skills deserved and, as a young and attractive woman, I got away with things for which any balding, grey-suited City man would have been fired on the spot. So that is what I wrote, and it was a “female perspective,” all right. But was it a universal female truth? Of course not, and other women may have very different stories to tell... commissioning a woman as a guarantor of gospel truth on all things female was a mistake. An experienced sociologist, someone who studied dozens of companies, interviewed hundreds of employees and approached the matter with scientific impartiality would have offered a far more useful perspective than mine... Yes, young girls need role models. But whether these role models are male or female is irrelevant. We admire other people for certain qualities. For me, these are honour, courage, talent, kindness, intellect. Decency. Perhaps skill, if it’s on the level of mastery. At a stretch, I would add commercial savvy. But not gender. Gender does not belong on this list... why should I be inspired by people like me? Out of a sense of duty or loyalty, rather than sincere admiration? Isn’t this the definition of thinking small and narrow?"

Opinion | I Was Once a Socialist. Then I Saw How It Worked. - The New York Times - "Socialism is the most compelling secular religion of all time. It gives you an egalitarian ideal to sacrifice and live for.My socialist sympathies didn’t survive long once I became a journalist. I quickly noticed that the government officials I was covering were not capable of planning the society they hoped to create. It wasn’t because they were bad or stupid. The world is just too complicated. I came to realize that capitalism is really good at doing the one thing socialism is really bad at: creating a learning process to help people figure stuff out. If you want to run a rental car company, capitalism has a whole bevy of market and price signals and feedback loops that tell you what kind of cars people want to rent, where to put your locations, how many cars to order. It has a competitive profit-driven process to motivate you to learn and innovate, every single day.Socialist planned economies — the common ownership of the means of production — interfere with price and other market signals in a million ways. They suppress or eliminate profit motives that drive people to learn and improve... Human living standards were pretty much flat for all of human history until capitalism kicked in. Since then, the number of goods and services available to average people has risen by up to 10,000 percent. If you’ve been around a little while, you’ve noticed that capitalism has brought about the greatest reduction of poverty in human history. In 1981, 42 percent of the world lived in extreme poverty. Now, it’s around 10 percent. More than a billion people have been lifted out of poverty. You’ve noticed that places that instituted market reforms, like South Korea and Deng Xiaoping’s China, tended to get richer and prouder. Places that moved toward socialism — Britain in the 1970s, Venezuela more recently — tended to get poorer and more miserable.You’ve noticed that the environment is much better in capitalist nations than in planned economies... The greatest environmental degradations are committed by planned systems like the old Soviet Union and communist China... People in the free economies have a life expectancy of 79.4 years. Those in the planned economies have a life expectancy of 65.2 years. Over the past century, planned economies have produced an enormous amount of poverty and scarcity. What’s worse is what happens when the political elites learn what you can do with that scarcity. They turn scarcity into corruption... A system that begins in high idealism ends in corruption, dishonesty, oppression and distrust... My next hero is Abraham Lincoln. He grew up poor and launched his career as a Whig. He gave more speeches on banking and infrastructure projects than on slavery... Over the last generation, capitalism has produced the greatest reduction in global income inequality in history... The reduction of inequality among nations has led to the increase of inequality within rich nations, like the United States... A big mistake those of us on the conservative side made was to think that anything that made the government bigger also made the market less dynamic. We failed to distinguish between the supportive state and the regulatory state. The supportive state makes better and more secure capitalists. The Scandinavian nations have very supportive welfare states. They also have very free markets. The only reason they can afford to have generous welfare states is they also have very free markets."

Doctors are the best hospital managers, study reveals - "doctor-led hospitals had quality scores some 25% higher than other units... This notion that practitioners make the best leaders is becoming familiar territory for Goodall, whose previous work suggested that many of the best universities are headed by academics"

Malaria-Transmitting Parasites Seem To Be Hampered By Minestrone And Other Soups - "Although the results were collected within a few months, it took two years for the work to get published. Another Eden Primary parent, pediatric nephrologist Stephen Marks, helped pitch the study to journals and championed the idea that the children of the school should be listed as authors — which they were when the study was finally released in November in the Archives of Disease in Childhood... It's not so far-fetched to search for medical breakthroughs in your grandma's or great uncle's kitchen concoctions, Baum says, pointing to the scientific literature extolling the curative properties of chicken soup. (Research studies like this one suggest that it curbs some symptoms of upper respiratory tract infections.)"

Austria struggles with marauding Krampus demons gone rogue - "In Austria, however, the figure of the Krampus has been part of pre-Christmas folklore for centuries, with men in costumes roaming the streets to scare children and grownups from the end of November to the middle of December. Yet in recent years the Krampus has developed to become an altogether very modern bogeyman, with a rising number of complaints about the demons acting in a drunkenly and disorderly fashion once they have donned their fearsome masks. In Carinthia, police recorded a number of violent incidents this year in the run-up to the official “Krampus day” on 5 December, with one person being hit in the face with a birch and an 11-year-old child being left with bloody cut on their thigh... “If large group of young men in masks roamed the streets on any other night of the year, the police would be called out in an instant,” said Wiesflecker. “In an anonymous collective, we are always more likely to overstep our boundaries.”"

Captain Marvel Named Most Mistake-Filled Film Of 2019 - "Meanwhile, not only has Avengers: Endgame earned the second place title of the highest number of errors, but it has also increased character porn searches on PornHub by 2912%."

7 Things You Might Not Know About Calvin and Hobbes - "1. Watterson to Spielberg and Lucas: Thanks, But No Thanks...
3. The Complete Collection Isn’t Quite Complete
Salem recalls a minor blow-up from readers when Watterson published two strips in the 1980s that depicted Calvin mocking the idea he might be adopted. In one strip, Calvin’s complains that “I’ll bet my biological mother would’ve bought me a comic book…” It was later changed to, “I’ll bet a good mother would’ve bought me a comic book…”Another strip, featuring Hobbes in a washing machine, is missing from the collection entirely. Some have speculated that putting the tiger in a spin cycle might be an unwelcome hint he’s not real. No one, including Watterson, ever wanted to have that question answered...
4. Watterson Did License. A Little.
Calvin appeared on a Museum of Modern Art shirt commemorating an Ohio State University exhibition of comic art in 2001; two calendars, for 1989 and 1990, were issued; the book Teaching with Calvin and Hobbes was a tutorial intended to help students improve their language skills; finally, the duo mugged for a postage stamp in 2010, part of a Postal Service sheet of comic strip icons.
5. Urine Trouble
While any true fan of Calvin and Hobbes finds the ubiquitous, unauthorized car decal of Calvin peeing on automotive logos distasteful, at least one state took legal action: In the late 1990s, South Carolina slapped drivers sporting it with a ticket for $200, declaring it “obscene.” In a 2005 Q&A with readers to promote the Complete collection, Watterson dryly noted that he “clearly miscalculated how popular it would be to show Calvin urinating on a Ford logo.”
6. Spaceman Spiff Was Originally the Whole Idea
7. The Last Calvin Strip Wasn’t Watterson’s Swan Song"